Farewell to Manzanar 575other, particularly the secret of their marital bed
(459). His knowledge of it proves his true identity,
and at last husband and wife are reunited.
James Ford
HouSTon, jEannE WakaTSuki
Farewell to Manzanar (1972)
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston begins her autobio-
graphical text, Farewell to Manzanar, after the
Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. The stable, fam-
ily-oriented life she has known as a child is altered
irreparably as her family is interned at the Man-
zanar War Relocation Center in California. The
text recounts the family’s life at Manzanar through
the perspective of a seven-year-old Wakatsuki who
spends three years of her childhood at the prison.
Because of the text’s young narrator, life at the camp
is occasionally portrayed as a new adventure where
Wakatsuki meets new people and easily adapts to
her imprisonment. However, as she ages, the nar-
rator reveals the more sobering side of internment
by focusing on her father’s emotional and physical
decline in the camp and her family’s disintegra-
tion. Wakatsuki also discusses the key concerns that
preoccupied internees, including loyalty oaths, the
abrogation of citizenship rights, the dispossession
of private property, and the predicament of having
emotional ties to two warring nations: Japan and the
United States. The book then shifts from the dev-
astating consequences of wartime hysteria to post–
World War II society as Manzanar is closed and the
Wakatsukis reluctantly leave the camp to return to
a hostile society. We follow the narrator’s struggles
to reacclimate herself into a postwar culture marked
by continuing racial discrimination against Japanese
Americans as she enters high school and tries to lead
a normal teenage life. The book is ultimately a bil-
dungsroman that narrates the trauma of internment
and the dissolution of family.
Belinda Linn Rincon
Family in Farewell to Manzanar
Farewell to Manzanar is a co-authored firsthand
account of how the internment of Japanese Ameri-
cans during World War II affected Jeanne Wakat-
suki Houston’s family. Houston’s girlhood memory
of watching her father and brothers sail off to work
as independent commercial fishermen comes to an
end as news of the Pearl Harbor bombing spreads.
Her father is suspected of delivering oil to Japanese
submarines and is interned at Fort Lincoln, North
Dakota. It will be one year before she sees him
again. This initial separation foreshadows the many
struggles that the Wakatsuki family will face to stay
physically and emotionally connected.
Weeks after her father is interned, the rest of
Houston’s family is sent to a camp called Manzanar.
Although they manage to remain in the same camp,
the stress and indignity of imprisonment begin
to change family dynamics as certain traditions
erode. For example, the camp system is designed
to serve meals to thousands of internees, making it
nearly impossible for families to eat together. Camp
authorities realize the negative impact this change
has on family unity and community morale when
sociologists who study camp life propose an edict
that orders families to start eating together again.
Houston describes how internment also affected
her parents’ relationship. Before her father was
reunited with the rest of the family at Manzanar,
her mother struggled to adjust to the deprivations
of camp life as the family was crammed into poorly
built wood shacks that failed to protect them against
the cold and the dust storms of the desert. The open
latrines, inedible food, and lack of schools fill her
mother with worry and distraction, which causes
Houston to seek attention elsewhere. Her mother
eventually adapts and works as a dietitian, but the
family’s fragile sense of stability ends when Hous-
ton’s father returns.
Papa becomes a brooding presence who stays in
the barracks all day, makes his own liquor, and gets
drunk. His depression relates to his time at Fort Lin-
coln. While he was there, he worked as a translator,
which raised suspicions among other internees when
he was released from Fort Lincoln before the other
men were. Many saw his early release as a reward for
collaborating somehow with camp authorities. Papa
deals with the shame he feels over these false accusa-
tions by drinking. His misery is compounded by his
lack of control over his surroundings, his family, and
his future. Papa had always been the patriarch who
maintained his wife and their nine children. The loss